SPI 828: Is This the Best Learning Tool? Exploring NotebookLM

SPI 828: Is This the Best Learning Tool? Exploring NotebookLM

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, If he sees a fly in the house, he’ll spend all day to get it if it comes down to it. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: It is exactly 11 p. m. on Saturday, September 28th. In about 5 hours, I have to get on a, well, I have to get on a Lyft to then get on a plane to go to Cancun! Woo! Well, not for a spring break or anything like that. It’s not spring. But, for a team retreat, yes, we are having our team retreat. Not in Cancun. We’re not, like, partiers or anything like that.

But, it’s off an island next to Cancun in Mexico to house ourselves for a few days to plan to get together, to come up with some great stuff for you for next year. I’m not going to talk too much about this. I did an episode last year when we all went to New Orleans. So every year we try to go somewhere new and try to do something exciting and fun for the team and to bond and to do some culture related things.

And then also get some good food, explore new places. And obviously, like I said, plan for the next year. And we’re going to be planning some major stuff in 2025. I keep telling you new stuff is coming. However, you already know some stuff is coming. You know, that Caleb has come on board to become CEO of the company.

And that officially goes down in two days from now, which is amazing. At least on the team, he’s been the creative director for several months now, but Matt stepping forward into something else, as we talked about in a previous round table episode, Caleb coming in as CEO, us working on top of funnel, Some smart strategies for content creation and always continuing to lead by example, building the community even stronger.

And all those kinds of things are all themes and motifs that I know are going to be discussed. And more, more stuff that I do know that I just don’t want to spoil for you quite yet. And we still have to plan out together. And that’s the cool thing about these team retreats. We are able to bring the entire team together and discuss these things so that we all know we’re on the same page so that we can all see what holes there may be in certain situations or certain ideas.

And that way we can kind of come at it from, you know, Hey, somebody has an idea, but then somebody in the community team might say, Oh, well, that actually involves a little bit more than you might think. Here’s what, what’s required and you know, so on and so forth. We can get a whole. Holistic approach from the brand to you.

So that’s all I’m going to talk about with the upcoming retreat. So I wanted to talk about something else because I heard. I actually heard this on a TikTok, and it blew my mind. It was this lawyer, she was in college studying for an exam. And she said that she found a revolutionary tool that was going to be a game changer when it came to studying.

And I think it could also be a game changer for learning anything, but also is just a game changer in technology in general. And this tool is called NotebookLM. And right now, if you go to notebooklm.google.com, it is in fact a Google product. I’m curious to know if this is one of those Google products that was created in their 20 percent of time.

You know, they give people like Google 20 percent of time to sort of innovate, come up with something new, work on their own projects. Gmail came out of that. A lot of other things came out of that. Remember Wave, google wave and how big of a deal that was supposed to be. It was like, I remember when you could see the other person typing. Like, it was revolutionary. I don’t know. Like, it was, it failed, obviously. Anyway, let’s go back to NotebookLM and this lawyer who was studying for an exam. She said that she had just taken some notes at a lecture and was studying for the bar exam and some other things, and this was just a lecture about a certain case and certain elements of the case and learnings that are going along with it.

And she said she put her notes, she uploaded them, her documents, to NotebookLM. She answered a few questions, and then what NotebookLM does is it converts that material into easy to understand formats. Like FAQs or briefing docs. But what she showed me in this TikTok was not just an FAQ or a doc. It was a conversation, an AI conversation between two people, an AI male voice and an AI female voice who were discussing the topics that were in her notes, but in a conversational way. I was learning and I’m more like, I don’t know anything. Well, I know a little bit about law. I know not to do certain things, but what I mean is for those terms and all the things that she was learning for her exam, like I was understanding it. I was, I was getting it.

They were offering different examples and they were discussing it in a way that had like one person answering the questions of the other and maybe it’s just because I listen to podcasts all the time, but that conversational setup that scenario Really cemented a lot of those things more than if I were to just read them in a book.

It was pretty cool. There was a case about somebody, like a mechanic, who had repaired tires, but left the nuts a little loose, and then that person got into an accident. So, the case was about whether or not this person, the mechanic, was going to get charged or not, because it was negligence on his part, fulfilling a service.

See, even that I listened to it for a 30 second TikTok and it stuck or at least that part of it, but it was again, it just was mind blowing notebooklm.google.com. And I’m here now. It says, create your first notebook. NotebookLM is an AI powered research, technology, And writing assistant that works best with the sources you upload.

So what I like about this, as opposed to something like ChatGPT is you are uploading the resources. So, I mean, you could do that with a bot or some sort of closed off container within ChatGPT or Claude or something like that, but this one I think is built for this specifically and the fact that it could take it and turn it into a podcast, kind of put characters to it, create FAQs, briefing docs is pretty, pretty cool.

Just kind of mind blowing. So they have some samples here too, and I can view the questions, the FAQ and all this other stuff. It’s just like, it’s kind of mind blowing. And I don’t know exactly where to go to turn it into a podcast. I’m looking at something right now in here, but I can analyze the potential economic and social benefits and challenges of transforming Westward into micro tourism destination. Okay. So that’s just about something else. Anyway, all this to say, once you think like there’s a way like that, there’s no more innovation in this thing. Like something comes around like this and it’s not even technological innovation, rather how to use the technology that exists and mold it in a way that works for a benefit of, you know, more people.

So I recommend you check that out. Notebooklm.google.com, it is an experimental site. And I’m finding that, you know, I’ve, I mentioned that I found this on TikTok. I’ve been doing a lot more TikTok with my Deep Pocket Monster shorts channel, right? So I have Short Pocket Monster on YouTube. Then I have the Deep Pocket Monster official Instagram page.

And then I have Deep Pocket Monster on TikTok. And each of those short form video platforms are all receiving the same videos every single day. So I am currently at day, what day am I at right now? 67. No, today was day 68 in a row of uploading daily shorts to each of those channels and the YouTube shorts channel is approaching 300,000 subs It has a trailing 28 days revenue of $15,000.

TikTok has a trailing 28 days of $4,000. And Instagram has $0. No, that’s not true. I made 22 cents on Instagram from somebody who just decided to gift me 22 cents, probably cause they felt bad. Cause I got a bad pack of cards or something. Monetization, like in a feed, like in YouTube or on TikTok is not possible.

Now the TikTok one has less subscribers. It has less views, still a substantial amount of views, but less views than YouTube. And it has what I think is like a 10X RPM. The RPM’s on, so this is revenue per milli or revenue per thousand views. On YouTube, it’s like 10 cents. Max. I mean, it’s been down to four for some videos and on TikTok it’s like I saw it at, but 1.14. At $1 for every thousand.

And that again, pales in comparison to the long form videos, the Deep Pocket Monster longs channel, or the regular Deep Pocket Monster channel. We are 55,000 subscribers away from 1 million, 1 million subscribers. That is just like. I feel like I will be crying when I hit a million because it’s just been, that’s been a goal for so long, especially for the Pat Flynn channel.

The Pat Flynn channel is not even at half a million yet. And that’s been up for 16 years or a very long time, 12, 15, a very long time, over a decade for sure. And this channel, the Deep Pocket Monster channel has been up for nearly four years and it’s approaching 1 million subscribers. And by far, it is the most viewed Pokemon YouTube channel on the internet right now on a per video basis.

Per video, we’re getting more views than anybody else. And on a per subscriber basis, meaning we are seeing more views often on our videos, then we have subscribers and nobody’s even close and our shorts channels doing it’s, it’s pretty cool what has been built. We also announced two, yes, two Card Parties next year in 2025, one in June in Tampa, Florida, and then one in Seattle in October.

And I went to Seattle a couple of weeks ago and it was really cool. We got a tour of, this is just more of an update podcast I’m realizing I, the NotebookLM thing was like, I don’t have to talk too much about it. It’s just something you have to go and experience. So I wanted to add more, more color in here.

We’ve got the team retreat. We’ve got NotebookLM, which was, you know, brought me into TikTok, which brought me into the shorts and update on, on all the things. It’s been pretty cool to see the Pokemon stuff, do what it’s doing. And when I went to Seattle to scout that area, brought Dan with me, producer, Dan, we filmed some promo video stuff.

We announced that live in front of people on our other card party channel. We have a card party HQ YouTube channel where we post just bits and pieces of the event. And we have a live stream when we announce our locations there. And we had, I think 700 people watch live when I announced Seattle’s location.

Anyway, we worked with the board of tourism there. They’re very excited. They want us to come and stay. For more than one year, of course, because it’s bringing people, it’s bringing money into the city when, and that’s a good thing. So there, they definitely went all out to, to kind of show their hospitality to us.

And we went on a great day. It was actually sunny. We saw the space needle. They took us there. And we also went to the Pikes marketplace. And that’s the famous marketplace used by a lot of mom and pop shops there with the flying fish, the guys who get fish from wherever, and then they throw them across the aisle, and we were able to get them to throw a Magikarp, which is a type of Pokemon, so they let me stand in the booth and they’re, they’re They yelled out whatever they yelled out, like Matt, one Magikarp, and they threw it across the way and people clapped.

It was pretty cool. So we captured that moment. We put it in the promo video. If you want to see that, you could see it at the Card Party HQ YouTube channel. And to be very transparent, the first two events, 2023 and 2024 were not profitable. Not profitable. The first one very much. Not profitable primarily because the hotel took all our money.

I mean, we signed in the contract, certain room blocks and we didn’t fill them. And so we owe them money for not filling in those blocks. And we made them, I mean, it wasn’t even a mistake. People just didn’t know. What the event was going to be like. People didn’t know that it was going to be an event that you’d want to stay at the same hotel that the event was at.

This did not exist. It exists in the business space. We see it all the time, but it did not exist in the Pokemon space and the Pokemon space events are usually just like a room full of vendors. You come and then you leave. And this was more of like camp or a cruise. It’s like there’s activities, there’s shows, there’s games, there’s community, there’s trade nights, all happening under the same place and same time with everybody.

And people didn’t even want to leave you from though they had to, because they didn’t book a hotel, even though quite a few did, but we didn’t fill in our spots. So we owed over six figures to the hotel after the first year. But we said, you know what, we’re going to keep this going. We see that this is doing something special here in the community.

People want to come back again. So we did it again in Orlando. It was a hit. We made up some of that cost, but we didn’t. We’re not in the black yet. Events like this, especially when you get into the multiple thousands of people in attendance, right, the ticket prices are a little lower and you very much rely on sponsors.

But if you’re brand new, the sponsors aren’t really sure if this is an event worth going to and worth, you know, sponsoring and putting money down for. But now that we’re in year three, We’re going to hope to be in the black and because we’re doing two next year, it should speed up that process. Even more events like this that are in the multiple thousands typically take three to five years, I found through just conversation to get profitable.

So, I mean, if Amazon could be not profitable for 30 years or whatever, in 25 years or something like that. And then here they are now, then, you know, we will be fine. We’ll be fine. Thankfully, we have some support from the community. Quite a bit of it. And the creators are just amazing. My team is amazing. I partnered with the podcast movement crew.

We’ve joined forces. My company and their company created a new company. And that company is the company that houses Card Party. We got the trademark for Card Party. We’re doing big things over here. It’s fun. Meanwhile, the team’s cranking over here at SPI. And myself included with the content and the plans that we have for next year for all good things happening here too.

And I mean, a lot of people to finish this up will go, Pat, you’re doing way too many things. How are you able to do this? It is only able to happen because I have some great people around me. The team here at SPI is amazing. They keep the show running and because we’re building a community, it’s not about me anymore.

I may be, you know, the face of the company and I might be at the helm and in the pilot seat every once in a while, but I’m not always steering the ship. It’s like an Avengers. crew, right? It’s not just Iron Man. It’s, it’s all of us kind of working together to help you out. And that’s great because, you know, if I’m out of commission or on break or, you know, working on something else, the team could pick it up in the community because it is community.

It’s self driven. People are in there helping each other out, which is great. It doesn’t mean we’re not in there, but to see the community helping the community is just incredible. So that’s going to be the end of my rambling today. Thank you so much for. listening and I appreciate you. I am very, very tired as I had to spend all day packing and I spent some time with the kids today, wanted to make sure we got some family time in before I left and enjoy this great San Diego weather that we’re having. And it’s probably going to be thunderstorming and raining the whole time while we’re over there, but it doesn’t matter. We’re going to be around each other and we’re going to be planning for you. I’m excited and I hope you’re excited too.

So thank you so much. Hit that subscribe button and I’ll see you in the next episode. Cheers.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!